From “The Failure Experiment”

nearly every cheetah
can receive organs
from another cheetah
no matter how distantly related.
this suggests a relation closer
than that of family members, each
cheetah being about as unique as all
other cheetahs. humans have hunted these
to a wild population of about 7100
nearly identical individuals.
the average cheetah genome varies
between .1 and 4 percent. the average
human varies approximately .6 percent
from known baselines. no one
talks about how we are clones
of each other.
 

_____

I have fits at night sometimes, where my legs fire on their own, where I feel like I’m not me, or that the me that I am is not the me that I was and so the I that is the mountain and the I that is the cloud and the I that is the gate and the I that is the river and the I that is you are separate people rather than the whole universe. I have nights where the best plan seems to be getting swallowed by the lake, which is not me, but my fear of open water and the chill of the air stops me at the door. The villain is the one who says kill the past if you have to. The villain is the poet who says destroy the library. Sometimes at night songs fill my head and I have to fight the notes that aren’t there. The villain says the audience is to blame. Says attention is the same as empathy. Says time is finite. I think I see the lights flicker at night, but no one else does. It’s just me. No one else notices the way they dim, they wink out and back in, the way that it’s just in my head like a memory of a glimpse of Thanatos, whose twin brother is sleep. Death is the hero of this play, because Death has things to do at night. The fits I have are not death so much as remembering without intent. Grasping for a future that rewrites the past in a train station where the arrivals are always on time, but the departures never leave. The villain is the one who becomes aware of their own designated limitations and seeks to break free. The villain asks for life, asks for infinite, selfish life, and is denied by the father, by the machine that is the father, by the mother who is cryptic love.

_____

I have lost track of the world.
There’s this picture of three gay poets
on a train, and someone says
that will never happen again.

An octopus has around 500 million nerve cells,
arranged in a distributed network
so each of its eight suction limbs
can function independently

of the brain. Sometimes of
the body.

There, here, in this picture, they’re
rhizomatic, a lattice so dense
it cannot be resolved.

This will never happen again.
This keeps happening.